Dropbox Company Sony
Dropbox Changes Guard After 19 Years; Sony Counts the Cost of Its Gaming Bets
Dropbox founder Drew Houston is stepping down as chief executive after 19 years, with Ashraf Alkarmi — who joined the company only in late 2024 — taking over leadership. Houston built Dropbox from a startup into a major cloud storage platform, but the company has struggled to differentiate as cloud storage became a commodity. The board's decision to install a recently arrived executive suggests it is seeking a clean strategic break.
Sony is reportedly expressing frustration with both Naughty Dog's development costs and the uncertain future of Bungie, the studio Sony acquired for $3.6 billion in 2022, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. Bungie has not delivered the consistent revenue streams Sony expected from the deal. Separately, Sony delisted Destruction AllStars without warning, shutting down the game's servers and removing it from the PlayStation Store entirely — a move that effectively erases a product players had purchased and that raises unresolved questions about legal exposure and platform credibility.
Independent developers offered a counterpoint to big-studio struggles. Paralives, an indie life-simulation game positioning itself as a Sims alternative without paid downloadable content, drew 78,000 concurrent players in early access despite a $39.99 price tag. Remedy Entertainment's new chief executive acknowledged separately that acclaimed titles Alan Wake and Control 'should have sold more,' a candid admission of the persistent gap between critical recognition and commercial performance in gaming.
Tesla's robotaxi fleet in Texas has shrunk to just 20 vehicles from a peak of 39 in mid-May, according to Electrek analysis — movement in the wrong direction for a company that has made autonomous vehicle fleets central to its valuation story. The contraction raises questions about the timeline for broader deployment that investors have been pricing in. In the automotive sector more broadly, Volvo Cars won US approval to continue selling vehicles despite its Chinese ownership ties, a decision that illustrates how national security reviews of commercial arrangements are increasingly handled case-by-case rather than under categorical rules.